I am writing some code and I am trying to use System.out.println() to print the name of an object.
For example, with the code String foo = new String("Hi");, I want to print out "foo".
How do I do this?
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WacfeldWang
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1`System.out.println("foo");` – Elliott Frisch Mar 19 '16 at 23:21
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@ElliottFrisch nice ! – Benoit Vanalderweireldt Mar 19 '16 at 23:21
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Yes, but that's hard-coded, which is not good – WacfeldWang Mar 19 '16 at 23:22
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@WacfeldWang But it has the advantage that it will work. – Elliott Frisch Mar 19 '16 at 23:22
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1I think you should read this. http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/66377/what-is-the-xy-problem What are you trying to achieve? – Paul Boddington Mar 19 '16 at 23:25
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1Possible duplicate of [Java Reflection: How to get the name of a variable?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/744226/java-reflection-how-to-get-the-name-of-a-variable) – scana Mar 19 '16 at 23:33
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@WacfeldWang You _cannot_ do this in Java. – Louis Wasserman Mar 20 '16 at 00:02
2 Answers
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You cannot do this, for multiple reasons. The simplest one is that one object can be referenced from multiple variables:
String foo = new String("Hi");
String bar = foo;
Now both foo and bar refer to the same String object "Hi". There is no way to decide on a single identifier.
Names of local variables are, essentially, a compile-time artifact. Once the compiler is done, you cannot access these names without access to the debug information produced when you compile with -g:vars compiler flag.
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Sergey Kalinichenko
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It's not possible the object reference name you give is not available at runtime.
Benoit Vanalderweireldt
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